When Mary Lee Settle was named the winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 1978, some of the newspaper and television critics were somewhat less than gracious about reporting the news. The writer was described as an "unknown." And there were complaints (in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, on television's "Today" show, and elsewhere) that the judging of the award for that year had been perhaps utterly irresponsible, at best completely whimsical. Some of the same sentiments had surfaced as early as the announcement of the five nominated books, weeks before the award itself was made. But none of the reporter-reviewers and journalist-critics in the prominent eastern publications seems to have been prepared for the eventuality that Settle's Blood Tie (1977) might, in fact, be the book chosen by the panel of judges. It soon enough developed, as both press coverage and controversy continued for a...